A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

Shows how social theorists--from William Godwin and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century to John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman in the twentieth--have based their thinking on two irreconcilable premises: the constrained and unconstrained vision Read more From Publishers Weekly Sowell, an economist and author (The Economics and Politics of Race, etc.), presents a provocative analysis of the conflicting visions of human nature that have shaped the moral, legal and economic life of recent times.

For the past 200 years, he writes, two visions of or gut feelings about how the world works, have dominated: the constrained vision, which views man as unchanged, limited and dependent on evolved social processes (market economies, constitutional law, etc.); and the unconstrained vision, which argues for man's potential and perfectability, and the possibility of rational planning for social solutions.